Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmitrygr | Hacker News Reader

This is actually a phenomenon that is well studied (as it happens, by NTSB). Automation that is 99% reliable - kills! Less is unrelible enough that you notice and watch it carefully, more is reliable enough to actually rely on. It is like the uncanny valley of automation.

View on HN

Sadly, humans that are 99% reliable kill more.

>Automation that is 99% reliable kills!

It also saves more lives than it kills people. So?

> It also saves more lives than it kills people. So?

Do you have data that the rest of us don't - that is data which identifies incursions (that is near-crash interactions which do not end in a crash) where vehicular automation acts correctly and human drivers do not?

If not, than you really can't make that statement.

You can say that "Tesla's luxury cars running under autopilot show fewer crashes per mile than average for all cars", and be accurate, but that's not "saving lives".

Depending on the numbers, the “saves more than it kills” standard may be 99.9% or 99.9999%. You need data to answer the question and any claims should be backed up by numbers, followed by a bunch of analysis. It’s definitely not something we can prove about currently sold technology with a one-line quip.

it's not quite there yet, unless you believe at the stats published by Tesla that compares apples and oranges.

Is there a cite for that study? Everyone wants to scream about these things being dangerous, but we're still stuck in the noise floor. There are still only four Tesla autopilot fatalities over the 5.5 years it's been available, the last just shy of a year ago. And the number of cars sold (and presumably autopilot miles driven) has been rising rapidly during that period.

I mean, seriously: if this technology "kills!" we really should have some statistics on that by now, right?

Google "handoff latency". It is a measure of how long it takes a human suddenly dumped into a situation they were not previously paying much attention to, to become fully aware of it and act accordingly. In aviation this is measured in Tens of seconds. This is ok since in aviation you're far from everything when automation is on and thus have tense of seconds to act.

With cars you may need a response in seconds or less in case of a disconnect. Humans suck at that.

Some sources: https://www.google.com/search?q=autopilot+disconnect+airplan...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com